Laura Alvarez

“Blow Up the Hard Drive”, 1999.
 Limited edition silkscreen, 18 x 26 inches.

Having Laura Alvarez as a guest speaker was a great experience primarily because she shared part of her life story with us and explained how she was able to process everything around her with different mediums of art. One of the most interesting things Alvarez said was that she would dress in fancy clothes when she would help her mother as a maid which, thereby suggests that Alvarez would try to change the way others saw her; she acknowledged the stigma maids had in society therefore dressed more sophisticated to revoke those notions. This was particularly interesting to me because I can connect to it and I feel others can too; we are conscious about which identities are stigmatized in any given space and will do things or dress differently to reverse those stigmas.

The piece I selected is, “Blow up the Hard Drive,” and I chose this image because it highlights several themes, all of which are important. First, the title itself is oblivious but to some degree that obliviousness relates to Alvarez’s life; she never knew her father’s role in working with the government and therefore this Double Agent Sirvienta (DAS) character is inspired by her father’s mysterious career. In the context of the audience however, the title is also mysterious― it made me think about what was in the hard drive that needed to be blown up and destroyed. Thus, this piece like most, if not all, of her artwork is influenced by her family and reflective of her personal life. Second, I feel this print challenges gendered norms, because yes the female character is a maid, but she is also an undercover detective, a career not generally thought of for women. Furthermore, there are many signs, letters, and numbers surrounding DAS, who is occupied with a laptop, which implies she is a coder, additionally refuting the notion that women are not capacitated to be in the STEM fields. Lastly, this print reinforces that everyone has a secret life, as mentioned by Alvarez, “you think you know people, but you really don’t;” she left us with this idea that there is more than meets the eye.